It's ski and snowboard movie season, time to see the best hits, bails, tits and rails last winter offered up. Or maybe putting tits in your snowboard video is old-school and no longer fashionable - the sport must be maturing.
Regardless, what I like to see in any ski or snowboard flick, other than linked turns, is riders going really huge into untracked landings. The ultimate video of all time wouldn't have a single bomb-hole in it. Unlike still shots, virgin landings are hard to fake on video.
There's a virgin landing at the two-minute mark of Sandbox's now you know . Just a rider and a giant, empty, perfect white screen of untracked pow. And it's shot from a helicopter. Touchdown!
The Sandbox crew and producer Kevin Sansalone always capture the joy of riding with your friends and the fun times to be had screwing around on a board. This year now you know continues the tradition of snow and shenanigans, featuring all sorts of pillow lines, cliffs, gnarly rails, bails and progressive jumps with FIS-sounding names like "double-corked 12" (remember when tricks had names like "Chicken Salad?" Which generation is having more fun I wonder?)
My favourite segment in now you know goes to Yes rider Jake Koia - he goes big, greases his landings real nicely and even manages to get a few quick turns on film before a boosting a cliff. Now you know premiers Saturday, Oct. 2 at Millennium place, with both 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. shows. It's slow season and this flick is designed to get you stoked for the upcoming winter, so quit stalking chicks on Facebook, get out of the house and go see now you know.
Speaking of Facebook. Did you know it has more than 500 million active users - that's 1 in every 14 people on earth. That populace spends 700 billion minutes a month "Facebooking." (How many billion minutes would it take to build a bunch of decent schools in the poor countries and dig a well or two?)
And according to The Social Network, also known as "the Facebook Movie", the whole thing is built around one lonely dork and his desire to meet chicks.
Opening Friday at the Village 8, and with a lot of sneaky hype to back it, The Social Network is an admittedly semi-fictional account of the life of Faceboook co-creator Mark Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse- Zombieland -Eisenberg, and his journey from militantly anti-social college dork to a getting-better adult dork with a few billion bucks.
The score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is money. The story is essentially a class struggle, written by Aaron Sorkin ( Malice) and directed by David Fincher ( Fight Club, Benjamin Button, Zodiac). The movie is a speedy, stylish examination of human interaction these days as Zuckerberg, a hero you hate to like (or is the other way around?), burns bridges and scratches at the old guard even though he really doesn't belong at their Harvard parties anyhow. His creation, Facebook, is an outcast's dream - everyone is the boss of their very own exclusive club. And the film is worth checking out.
Another good Internet flick is Catfish , some kind of documentary about meeting people over the internet with an ending everyone who's seen it is pretty tight-lipped about. Sounds promising. Catfish is playing at Tinseltown in Vancouver.
Speaking of building schools in poor countries. The real Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps in an attempt to offset how The Social Network portrays him - perhaps because he's secretly awesome - donated $100 million bucks to the Newark School System to build a new paradigm for education in America. You gotta "Like" that.
